The disclosed embodiments of the present invention relate to video decoding, and more particularly, to a multi-core video decoder system having at least one shared storage space accessed by different video decoder cores and related video decoding method.
Video coding technologies have been widely used in a variety of applications, including digital video streaming, digital video storage, digital television broadcasting, etc. If no video coding is used, the data amount of the video would be very large. For example, considering a video clip having 720×480 pixels per picture, 30 pictures per second and a playback time of 90 minutes, the data amount of this video clip is about 167.96 GB (Giga Bytes). The video coding technique achieves data compression by exploiting spatial and temporal redundancy in the video contents. Hence, a video encoder is designed to efficiently reduce spatial and temporal redundancy to achieve the video compression.
When receiving an encoded video bitstream, a video decoder is operative to reconstruct pictures of the video by decoding the encoded video bitstream. In general, the conventional video decoder employs one video decoder core to reconstruct pictures of a standard definition (SD) video or a high definition (HD) video. However, regarding an ultra high definition (UHD) video, it is composed of pictures each having a resolution higher than that of the SD/HD picture. For example, the UHD picture may have a resolution of 3840×2160. The data amount of one UHD picture is much larger than that of one SD/HD picture, and may exceed the decoding capability of the conventional single-core video decoder. If the conventional single-core video decoder fails to reconstruct one UHD picture in time, the display quality of the UHD video would be degraded.